My Influential Books: Richards Topical Encyclopedia

This third in a haphazard series of essays on books that made a big difference in my life follows posts on You Will Go To the Moon by Mae and Ira Freeman, and Yellow Yellow by Frank Asch and Mark Alan Stamaty. Today's: Richard's Topical Encyclopedia, copyright 1959.

I wasn't yet born when Richards Topical Encyclopedia was published, but I might have been on the way. I'm not sure what Mom was thinking when she bought it. She had no higher education herself--I infer she only scraped through high school--but books were important to her and encyclopedias were the most important, highest-status books of all. She was a poor single working mother with two kids but nevertheless managed to outfit our house with (as I recall) three sets of encyclopedias by the time my sister and I could read. I think at least one of them was the sort you could buy volume by volume every time you went to the grocery store. It's possible she was repeatedly suckered by slick door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen, but I'd rather believe she was doing her best to till fertile ground for her children's minds to grow.

The set's 15 volumes weren't organized alphabetically, but by subject: science, social studies, industry, art, biography, leisure activities. Each volume comprised many short articles on particular subtopics, all well illustrated. Although the reading level seems aimed at pre-teen kids, their content was solid and thorough. I don't see any condescension or "dumbing-down."

I read them all, enthralled. Some volumes several times.

That had some unfortunate consequences. Getting a reputation as "the weird kid who reads encyclopedias for fun," even if it's not a regulation encyclopedia, had its social drawbacks--though knowing many of my blog's regular readers, I'm sure that's familiar turf for some.

Volumes 1 and 2 had all the astronomy and physics material. I practically wore them out.

Richards Topical Encyclopedia did me the great favor of introducing me to the work of space artist Chesley Bonestell, at right. By the way, kiddies, that photo of Mars on the left was about as good a view as anyone had of the Red Planet until the mid-'70s. Because I'm old. (Click on any of these pics to see them larger.)

Volume 14 was the real jackpot: "Leisure-time Activities," which were summarized on the volume's spine as "manual arts, games and sports, fairy tales, fables, stories, myths." What an understatement! Unmentioned on the spine: riddles, jokes, codebreaking, magic tricks, puppetry, card games, brain teasers, candy making, and fort building. Many rainy and snowy days were passed lost in the pages of Volume 14.

A spread from the mythology section, a great companion to Edith Hamilton's classic book. Also probably where I saw my first nekked women. Bless the ancient Greeks and the Romantic artists (and generations of young boys) they inspired.

My sister and I would occasionally put on magic shows featuring feats from this volume. Some of them worked some of the time.

I cannot express how much I wanted to build this private clubhouse with its secret subterranean entrance. Never got around to it, although it's still on my bucket list.

Our original set of Richards Topical Encyclopedia was lost more than 30 years ago. At the time, Mom and Dad had a coastal vacation home they rented to visitors; it had to be stocked with household stuff including old books, and when the home was later sold the stuff went with it. Somehow, Volume 1 got culled from the herd and eventually ended up in my bookcase. That gave me all the information I needed to years later find the entire set on eBay. Got it for a good price. Some people don't recognize solid gold.

I'll never know why Mom bought Richards Topical Encyclopedia. But if some salesman convinced her that it would change her children's lives, he was 100% right. She got her money's worth.

My Influential Books: Yellow Yellow

I recently got the notion to, from time to time, write about a book that influenced my life. I unknowingly started this series (if it becomes a series) back in July 2009, when I wrote about how important Mae and Ira Freeman's children's book You Will Go to the Moon (1959) was in molding my Space Age expectations. That was the first.

The second, Yellow Yellow by writer Frank Asch and artist Mark Alan Stamaty, was published by McGraw-Hill in 1971. I guess it's a children's book, though that glib categorization doesn't do it justice. I would've been 11 or 12 when my parents gave it to me--way too old for a children's book but just the right age for a capital-A Art book. Mom and Dad expected their budding cartoonist to be electrified by its hyper-detailed rendering and formal playfulness. They were right.

Yellow Yellow is the tale of a boy who finds a yellow hard hat, inventively plays with it for a while, returns it to its owner, and goes home to make his own yellow hat out of paper. That's the plot. If Asch's charming but slight story had been illustrated by P.D. Eastman or the Berenstains, it might've been a fondly remembered addition to Random House's Beginner Books library.

Instead, Stamaty's artwork turns it into a sort of innocent's odyssey through a grotesque urban hellscape, part Hieronymus Bosch and part Ralph Steadman. It's got an Underground (circa 1970) sensibility, though I wouldn't have known what that meant at the time. Grungy and subversive, rewarding through multiple readings on a couple of levels. At a time of my life when the universe of comics consisted of newspapers strips and DC superheroes, Yellow Yellow expanded my understanding of what comics could be.

A two-page spread (most of the book comprises two-page spreads--click on the images to see them larger) showing the boy discovering his yellow hat. The detail in this is both obsessive and impressive. Stamaty folded a lot of little asides and gags into his visual stew.

A detail of the left page above: A toad with a high school class ring for an eye fights a spider and a beetle for his dinner. Are the spider and beetle trying to save the bug because they're his pals or because they also want to eat him? Unresolved dramatic tension! And look at that gorgeous chicken wire!

One tiny detail from another page: a one-face two-bodied bird begs for help. Perhaps the sweet merciful release of death? The gag's payoff comes three pages later where a bird with one body but two heads pleads for the same. That's weird, right?

The boy meets his hat's rightful owner. For me, this drawing captures the mood of the book. It's sort of ugly, every whisker in the worker's scruffy beard practically prickling off the page, but the man doesn't look at all angry or menacing. He's just a Regular Joe who lost his hat. Even though he deprives the boy of his wondrous new toy, he's not the bad guy.

After handing over the hard hat, the boy goes home and Yellow Yellow slips into a neat bit of formal inventiveness. First the boy draws a yellow hat by itself on a piece of paper. Then he draws yellow straw, yellow lemons, yellow corn and dandelions . . .

. . . until the entire two-page spread is colored solid yellow, so that the book we're reading looks just like the paper the boy is coloring. Then the boy folds the paper . . .

A good example of Stamaty's thoughtful use of white space contrasted with the over-busyness of the boy's alphabet-and-airplane wallpaper (which, again, is fun to closely examine). There's not a detail on the floor indicating carpet, wood, color, texture, shadow; the floor is implied by the boy's posture and the few objects that rest on it. It occurs to me as I write this that the bat leaning against the bookcase really helps define the space since we read from left to right, making it one of the first details we perceive on the page, and instinctively know bats don't float in mid-air.

. . . and makes himself a new yellow hat.

Yellow Yellow was published more than 40 years ago and is out of print. Both Asch and Stamaty are still working prolifically, with long bibliographies to their credit. I think I somehow managed to raise two children without encountering Asch's many children's books (I count more than 80 listed on his website), but happily realized I've seen a lot of Stamaty's illustrations done for the Village Voice, The New Yorker, and many other publications. Looking over their bios, Yellow Yellow was very early in both their careers, just a couple of years out of college. For a lot of writers and artists, Yellow Yellow would be a career highlight; one measure of the success Asch and Stamaty have enjoyed is that you have to dig pretty deeply into their resumes before either mentions it.

I like to imagine I can see the seeds of that success in this early work. Yellow Yellow was an eye-opener for me.

You Will Go to the Moon

Forty years ago today Apollo 11 lifted off for the Moon, and I couldn't think of a better tribute than to celebrate a book that told me the biggest lie of my life.

You Will Go to the Moon was written by Mae and Ira Freeman and illustrated by Robert Patterson, and I read it a bajillion times when I was a kid. Published in 1959, this Random House Beginner Book soaked through my skin, rearranged my DNA, and prepared me to be a citizen of the stars instead of the little South Dakota neighborhood from which I watched Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins make history. My original copy is long gone, but I found one in a used book store a few years ago and happily gave it a place of honor on my shelf of much more serious and scholarly tomes on astronomy and space exploration. It taught me more than pretty much all the rest together, even though almost nothing in it is right.

The influence of Wernher Von Braun's vision of spaceflight is strong and obvious--surprisingly so for as late as 1959, when the real manned space program had gotten underway. The fat winged rocket above and the classic doughnut-shaped space station below are pure Von Braunian goodness, so iconic of their time it's easy to forget they were once serious suggestions for actual space vehicles.

Of course, nothing says "going boldly where no man has gone before" more than drinking a cup of coffee at an orbital soda fountain or watching a Western projected onto a tiny movie screen. I love the idea of a soda jerk in space, complete with white paper hat and
t-shirt (behind the coffee drinkers below, unfortunately obscured by a blotch of childhood graffiti). I wonder what that "help wanted" ad would look like.

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Once your spider-legged landing craft leaves the space station and reaches the Moon, you can pull an accordian-limbed space suit over your red cardigan and bound out to your bubble-topped Moonmobile, ready to explore your new home.

What terrific art! I've seen a later edition of You Will Go to the Moon illustrated more realistically, informed by Apollo hardware and actual lunar landings. I don't think it's nearly as good. If I can't blast off to a space station with a soda fountain and race Moon cars through craters like dune buggies, well, I hardly see the point in going.

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When Mr. Patterson and the Freemans promised me I would go to the Moon, I believed them. Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow is partly a decades-late thank you note to them. I allow myself the indulgence of imagining that a young reader reaching the end of my book might come away thinking like I did 40 years ago. Even if it turns out to be a lie, I expect they'll be forgiving.

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